New Touching Clips From Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi'

November 12, 2012 (6:35 am) GMT

One clip shows Pi Patel's first encounter with the tiger when he was a kid, while the other one sees his struggle to survive in the sea with his man-eating best friend.

"Life of Pi" unveils more clips leading to its U.S. release on November 21. One of the clips focuses on a touching scene where the child version of titular character first met the tiger he would embark on an adventure with when he grows up.

Their first encounter happened in the zoo, in which Pi tries to understand the soul of the tiger by giving him food directly from his hand. However, an angry zookeeper stops the kid from doing so and leaves the tiger terrified.

The second snippet, meanwhile, highlights a compilation of tear-jerking scenes where Pi and the tiger fight together in order to survive in the open sea. They are seen forming a strong bond over the same background as orphans.

Pi is a young man who survives a tragic disaster at sea and is hurtled into an epic journey of adventure and discovery. While marooned on a lifeboat, he forms an amazing and unexpected connection with the ship's only other survivor - a fearsome Bengal tiger.

Director Ang Lee recently discussed why he decided to adapt the film from Yann Martel's book though he first thought it was hard to get the novel a big screen treatment. "It seemed obvious that structure wouldn't work for a movie," he shared to Total Film.

"They let me read the previous draft and I was impressed," he went on explaining why he changed his mind. "I thought first of all I've got to bring the structure, and it came to me, the idea '3D'. I just thought I needed another dimension to make it possible. I needed to find a voice for the movie because the book to me is not a 16-year-old voice from India, it's a Canadian dude."

He continued, "I put Yann Martel in there [Irrfan Khan as the grown up Pi tells his story to Rafe Spall's writer]. Then I got excited. It's a difficult but not impossible project and I took the challenge, including coming all the way here [Taiwan]. I don't think I could make it anywhere else."